Monthly Archives: October 2012

“The Cuban Wives” is the Film Winner at the 27th Trieste Latin-American Film Festival

Oct. 30, 2012
Special to freethefive.org

“The Cuban Wives” by Alberto Antonio Dandolo has won the prestigious Malvinas Award at the 27th Trieste Latin American Film Festival. The Malvinas Award, aimed at promoting coexistence among peoples and International Law, has been awarded by a jury composed by the Argentinean writer Juan Octavio Prenz, the Italian author and journalist Massimiliano Cocozza and Hector Sommerkamp professor at the University of Trieste, for the following reasons:

“Due to the sensitivity and attention to the issue of justice as the foundation of a better society. A moving narrative and objective on the trials of our times.”

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Prime Minister Michael Manley’s close contact with Cuba was a key main issue in the 1980 election campaign. That October, Edward Seaga won a landslide victory after charging that Manley’s close relationship with Cuba resulted in Cuban support to leftist terrorists in Jamaica. In addition, Jamaican security forces had discovered large amounts of small arms ammunition in the aircraft bringing Cuban diplomatic missions to Jamaica. Concurrently, Jamaican youth sent to Cuba for vocational training returned to Jamaica reported that they also received political indoctrination and military training.

Following their victory, the newly elected Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) quickly moved to distance itself from Cuba. In January 1981, Kingston ended the “brigadista” program – a Cuban initiative wherein roughly 1400 Jamaican youths were trained to become construction workers. Jamaica ordered its remaining students to return. The JLP administration warned Cuba to cease its involvement in Jamaican affairs. At the time, Cuba had 15 Intelligence Officers assigned to its Embassy in Jamaica. Jamaica broke relations with Cuba on October 29, 1981.

DGI officer Ricardo Belen Cabrisas Ruiz served as the Commercial Counselor in Ontario from approximately January 1967 through at least October 1970. According to DGI defector Gerardo Peraza, Cabrisas Ruiz performed so well as chief of the DGI Centro that he was promoted to serve as Ambassador to Japan just a few years later. He currently serves as Vice-President of the Council of Ministers.

Editor’s Note: The General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) was the name previously used by the foreign intelligence wing of the Ministry of the Interior. Following a 1989 “scandal” and reorganization, this service was reorganized and given a new name – the Directorate of Intelligence (DI).

Everybody knows what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis: Kennedy and Khrushchev went eyeball-to-eyeball and the Russians blinked, saving humanity from possible nuclear annihilation. Except that a national security scholar at Villanova University says that’s not all that occurred. That we have missed and misunderstood crucial events that took place in the weeks before the confrontation. And that, while John F. Kennedy performed admirably, infighting and distrust between his administration and the intelligence community helped propel a dangerous situation toward a global crisis.

In a new book, Blind Over Cuba, political science professor David Barrett offers a detailed, disquieting analysis of the “photo gap” – a five-week period in which American intelligence flights over western Cuba were suspended. That span proved to be exactly when the Soviets were deploying missiles. Look closer and “you discover there are all sorts of things that aren’t quite the same as the mythology,” Barrett said. “This isn’t the Hollywood movie.” His book is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the crisis, which played out over 13 days in October 1962.

Coauthored with Max Holland, editor of the online monthly Washington Decoded, it’s based on declassified documents, archive materials, and interviews with several participants. Blind Over Cuba tells the story of an intelligence failure as compelling as any in a spy novel. To wit: The CIA director happened to be on a French Riviera honeymoon at a critical moment.

The crisis was the closest the world has come to nuclear war. Anniversary seminars and observances abound, from the Kennedy Library in Boston, to Greenville, S.C., where a wreath was placed at the grave of the incident’s only fatality, pilot Rudolf Anderson Jr.

Foreign Policy magazine is chronicling the crisis in real-time tweets, while the National Archives showcases Kennedy’s secret White House recordings and his doodles on a yellow pad: “Missile. Missile. Missile.” Probably no foreign-policy crisis generated more books, Barrett noted. But he sought to tell a largely unknown story, documenting how the administration’s response was not “wonderfully coordinated and error-free crisis management,” as then-national security adviser McGeorge Bundy asserted, but quite the opposite.

Though he appears to have taken a break from his writing, Fidel Castro utilized one of his last “Reflections” columns to commemorate “The 67th Anniversary of the Victory over Nazi Fascism.” In it, he offered congratulations to the Russian people, saying that, because the Soviets under Stalin had fought so hard to preserve Communism, they were able to “crush the invaders who wished to impose a thousand years of Nazism and holocaust on all humanity.”

The aging dictator has shown confusion in the past when applying the Nazi and holocaust labels. Two years earlier, he outraged many of the typically sympathetic members of the UN Human Rights Council meeting when he declared that the “Fuhrer’s swastika is today Israel’s banner,” adding: “The hatred felt by the state of Israel against the Palestinians is such that they would not hesitate to send the one and a half million men, women and children of that country to the crematoria where millions of Jews of all ages were exterminated by the Nazis.”

Castro’s calumny is standard fare in the professionally practiced anti-Semitism of today’s far-left propaganda, which tries to portray its ideological roots as antithetical and in opposition to Nazism and fascism, which it portrays as occupying the right side of the political spectrum. This has always been a false dichotomy, rooted more in historical schisms that occurred before World War II and the ideological turf-wrangling that took place after.

A story published last week in Germany’s Die Welt puts to rest this false dichotomy, proving that it is extremism itself, rather than the edifying tenets of particular extremist ideologies, that drives radical leaders to murder and oppress their own people, even as they proclaim it a necessary evil to reach the promised paradise of their particular ideology.

According to Die Welt, newly uncovered documents from the German intelligence agency (BND) show that Fidel Castro actively recruited former Nazi paramilitary officers to train his revolutionary army in 1962, and offered salaries four times higher than these former Nazis would have received in Germany to come to Havana to impart their know-how.

According to the declassified documents, the BND believed that Castro’s entreaties “Clearly showed that Cuban Revolutionary Army personnel had little fear of contact with our Nazi past when it served their own cause.” The report further states that four former Nazis had accepted the offer, and confirmed that two of the Nazi trainers actually made it to the island to begin work.

Castro apparently didn’t stop at purchasing the services of Nazi paramilitary trainers. According to the documents, Castro sought out the services of two renowned Nazi operatives, Otto Ernst Remer and Ernst-Wilhelm Springer, to help the Cuban government purchase 4000 Belgian machine guns.

“There are, I think, almost 3,000 Americans in foreign jails. Almost all of them are in there for doing something.” That is the assessment given to JNS.org by U.S. Rep. Bob Turner (R-NY), a leading advocate for the freedom of 53-year-old Brooklyn flooring contractor Jacob Ostreicher – who, according to his supporters, is wrongly imprisoned in Bolivia and therefore falls outside the “almost 3,000 Americans” cited by Turner. Ostreicher’s situation is one of three high-profile cases of American Jews overseas who remain either controversially imprisoned or held hostage.

In early October, lawyers for 63-year-old Alan Gross, a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor imprisoned in Cuba since December 2009 for trying to bring that country’s Jewish community Internet access, announced that a doctor who reviewed Gross’s medical records found a tumor in his right shoulder that may be cancerous. The tumor is a “potentially life-threatening medical problem that has not been adequately evaluated to modern medical standards” by Cuban doctors, according to Dr. Alan A. Cohen. Since that revelation, Cuba has been “surprisingly quiet in response, and I say surprisingly because typically they tend to be very aggressive at responding to claims about Alan’s situation, and I think the detailed nature of Dr. Cohen’s assessment has flummoxed them and they’re not quite sure how they can respond,” said Gross lawyer Jared Genser.

Gross, who lived in Potomac, Md., received a 15-year prison sentence even though he was working with “peaceful, non-dissident, Jewish groups” in Cuba, according to the US. Cuba convicted him of “crimes against the state.” In August, Gross’s lawyers filed a petition asking the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to conclude that Cuba had violated Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) – a treaty that guarantees freedom of expression and the rights to receive and disseminate information freely through any media of choice – by imprisoning Gross. Cuba “didn’t point to anything [Gross] did beyond provide publicly available computer equipment to Jewish communities down in Cuba, and that falls squarely within the protections for article 19 of the ICCPR,” Genser said, making his ongoing detention “a flagrant violation of Cuba’s obligations of international law.”

Cuba has 60 days to respond to the UN petition. Gross’s team is expecting the UN arbitrary detention working group to hear the case in mid-November and to issue an opinion in mid-December. The group’s opinions are not binding under international law and there is no enforcement provision that could compel Cuba to comply, but Genser said a ruling in Gross’s favor could still be a significant step. On Capitol Hill, the push for Gross’s freedom received broad bipartisan support in September, with 44 U.S. senators signing a letter to Cuban President Raul Castro asking for Gross’s release.

With this week marking the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, Americans are recalling the 13 days in October 1962 when the Soviet Union and Cuba’s Fidel Castro brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

But in assessing the crisis, and President John F. Kennedy’s decisions over those 13 days, it is equally important to consider what has happened since. Using what the late U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick called the “politics of deception,” Cuba’s Castro brothers have maintained power through international deceit, blackmail and hostage-taking.

The past decades have shown that the behavior of the Castro brothers in 1962 was perfectly characteristic. Fidel Castro has never shied away from a political gamble such as deploying secret Soviet missiles and then lying about them. He assured other governments that he would never do such a thing, just as the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United States told the Kennedy administration that rumors about missiles were false. But the missiles were there, and their deployment was an effort to intimidate and blackmail America.

Today, Havana’s intimidation and blackmail are of a different magnitude, but there are plenty of examples.

Days ago, a Cuban court sentenced young Spanish politician Angel Carromero to four years in prison for committing manslaughter in the death of Oswaldo Payá, one of Cuba’s most prominent human rights leaders. Payá died while a passenger in a car Mr. Carromero was driving, when it veered off the road and hit a tree under suspicious circumstances. Payá’s family says that Mr. Carromero has sent text messages saying that a vehicle (presumably driven by Cuba’s state security police) was attempting to force him off the road. The family was prevented from attending the trial and is calling for an international investigation.

For years, state security had tried to intimidate Payá and his foreign visitors, part of a larger effort to discourage democracy advocates from visiting or contacting Cuban dissidents. Havana similarly tries to intimidate other countries—such as Spain, whose nationals have business interests in Cuba—into accepting its routine violations of human rights, including the beatings of dissidents.

Joining Mr. Carromero as a hostage in Cuba is Alan Gross, an American development worker held since December 2009. His supposed crime: giving a laptop computer and satellite telephone to a group of Cuban Jews.

Mr. Gross has lost some 100 pounds in prison, according to his wife, who also reports that he has a growth on his shoulder that may be cancerous. The Castro regime intends to keep him in prison until the U.S. government releases five Cuban spies from prison in the U.S.

There is long history here. In 1962, Fidel Castro wrung $53 million from Washington in exchange for releasing the prisoners he had taken after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Before that, during the guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship, Raúl Castro extorted thousands of dollars from owners of sugar mills, threatening to burn down their homes and mills unless they aided the guerrillas. In June 1958, he tried to force negotiations with Washington by kidnapping 29 American sailors and marines; when word got out that Washington might send U.S. Marines to rescue the hostages, the Castros freed them.

In dealing with Cuba’s regime, the Obama administration has too often sent contradictory signals of U.S. resolve. Though Raúl Castro (who now heads the Cuban government) has refused to allow Mr. Gross to return to the U.S. to visit his seriously ill mother, the Obama administration allowed a Cuban spy to leave an American halfway house to visit his sick mother. While Mr. Gross remains in prison, the Obama administration last year issued visas to Raúl Castro’s daughter and her retinue so they could visit America and attack its Cuba policy.

The lessons of October 1962 must not be forgotten. President Kennedy showed fortitude and resolve in forcing the Soviet Union to stand down. Whoever wins the Nov. 6 election ought to deal similarly with today’s intimidation and deception from the Castro regime.

Mr. Bush is a former governor of Florida. Mr. Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C.

October 22, 1974: Uruguay provided a 35-page to the Organization of American States (OAS) that detailed allegations regarding Cuban support to the Tupamaros. The report focused on the period 1968 to mid-1973 and was based largely on intelligence from captured guerillas. The document dealt mainly with the specific training Cuba provided, as well as the existence of the Tupamaros cells in Havana.